Lars-Christian.com|This is me at the intarwebs.

Well today is a day of joy for me, as I can finally say that I’ve made the very first sponsorship deal for Bloggst. As I’ve mentioned several times in interviews and here on my blog, my plan for monetizing Bloggst relies mostly on selling direct advertisements, as opposed to using various ad networks like for instance AdSense.

In my experience, while this method initially requires more effort from my end, it has far more potential in terms of profits. It also helps you expand your network of contacts, which I have found to be one of the most crucial elements of making money online. Once you have a few advertisers on board, so long as you provide them with a nice return for their investments, you will find that this is not only the most profitable way of monetizing a website, but also the most enjoyable by far.

The sponsor I just agreed with for Bloggst is called Inblogit, a blogging platform that is sort of a hybrid between WordPress and Blogger, in the way that it lets you create your own blog on your own domain with full control over it, but the content is still hosted on their centralized servers. As a part of the deal, I also agreed to do a review of the product, so keep an eye out for that if you want to know more about it. Obviously a very relevant product for the members and readers of Bloggst, which is another pro of selling your own ads yourself. You have complete control over which ads are displayed on your site.

I’m sure you’re all wondering how I managed to snatch this deal, seeing how I’ve yet to even put up an “Advertise” page over at Bloggst. Well it was as easy as when I found their site, I immediately recognized their product as something that could be of benefit to our members at Bloggst, and then emailed them a quick proposal. After receiving my proposal and looking through Bloggst, they saw the same as I did, and decided to bite. From there on, we just worked out the details.

Let that be a little lesson on how easy it can be to sell your ads. Find products and services that are relevant to your visitors, and contact these with a proposal to advertise. The worst thing that can happen is that they say no, and if they do, you can proceed on your list and ask the next company in line. Now I’m contemplating setting up an AdServer, just so that I can give my advertisers detailed stats of how their campaigns at Bloggst are performing, but I think I will put that off until I get some more advertisers on board.

This first deal is a huge source of inspiration for me to keep working and pouring all my best efforts into Bloggst, even though things have been growing quite slowly lately, because it shows that if I just keep doing what I’m doing, I will eventually be rewarded. It was just what I needed right now to get the motivation back. And I’m happy to announce that if I manage to land only one more sponsor this month, I will already be ahead of my monetization goals for Bloggst for the month of June

Now I really need to get back to the books. Exams are coming closer every minute, and I’m still far from well prepared!

Kevin Rose and the rest of the people over at Digg just discovered that the old saying about women definitely goes for geeks as well. The incident started when the “invisible” administrators started deleting record-breaking stories in terms of popularity over at Digg, and as if that wasn’t enough, they also decided to go ahead and ban most of the people that posted these stories, just to be on the safe side.

As would soon become apparant to the guys over at Digg, there is a fine line with what you can get away with when over a million registered users are watching your every move. Soon after it seems that every active participating member of Digg was submitting a new story containing the content that banned from Digg, and there was no way of preventing it from completely taking over the frontpage. Seconds ago, the frontpage of Digg looked like this:

Every single story in the top 10, and the rest of the frontpage from what I could comprehend, is a result of the mayhem that’s going on over there right now. What puts a bit of an interesting twist on this story is that the topic in question that was swiftly censored at Digg was in fact just a number (09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 - living on the dangerous side today!) that the movie industry has copyrighted. Interestingly enough, HD-DVD is also a rather significant sponsor of Digg, which makes their references to their sudden references to their ToS seem somewhat weak and sporadic at this point.

All of this just goes to show that when you’re dealing with people in charge of the content, you need to be wary of how, when and what you decide to interfere with, and transparency is probably the best approach. In a previous post I stated that the current policy at Digg that lets the moderators delete content at their own discretion doesn’t fit with their image of being a user-driven source for news, and to be honest, I’m quite frankly just surprised that it took so long until something like this happened.